Quarto

Welcome to our lesson on Quarto! The videos in this section will take you about 15 minutes to complete on normal speed.

This module was created by Fridah Ntika '25.

Most order of content and some questions came from Sandy Liu's ('25) RMarkdown module.

What is Quarto?

Quarto is an open-source system for publishing documents. It is markdown-based and allows you as the user to combine text with R code (or Python, Julia, or Observable code), tables, and visualizations in a single document that can be rendered into HTML, PDF, Word, websites, analytics dashboards, and slideshows. 

For applied data analysis, Quarto supports reproducible analysis, much like R Markdown. This means that your code and results live together in one document. When you update your code or data set, your entire document updates automatically.

Quarto has become very popular among data scientists because of its versatility with languages. It is also ramping up because it serves as a middle point for analysts, engineers, and stakeholders to meet. 

What is the difference between R Markdown and Quarto?

Quarto and R Markdown have very similar syntax and workflow models, but they also have major differences.

R Markdown:

1. R Markdown was built for R and so has R as its dependency.

2. To use other extensions such as bookdown, distill, and blogdown, the user has to install them as separate packages.

3. Uses knitr to execute code and publish the document/webpage.

Quarto

1. Quarto does not depend on RStudio. It does not have an R dependency. This means that it works with R, Python, Julia, Observable JS, and any other in the future. It is not tied to any one language.

2. Because Quarto is multilingual, the user can run multiple languages in the same file.

3. The packages that need to be installed in R Markdown are built in Quarto.

4.  Quarto can be run on R Studio, the command line, JupyterLab, and VS Code.

File Types

As mentioned earlier, Quarto allows you to produce several document types. Please review the ones attached below to get a sense of how each one looks, and take note of any differences you may notice.

Getting Started

-- please let me know which intro video you find better between this and the other one in the folder --

Question1: Quarto has an R dependency. TRUE or FALSE?

Basic Formatting

Question 2: How many working modes are there in RStudio, and what are they called?

• 1 - Visual mode

• 2 - Visual and Source mode

• 2 - Source and Editor mode

• 3 - Editor, Source, and Visual mode

Question 3: How do we italicize text?

• ** the text that needs to be italicized **

• ^ the text that needs to be italicized ^

• ## the text that needs to be italicized

• * the text that needs to be italicized *

Code Chunks

Question 4: How do we include R code (that needs to be executed) in the Quarto Markdown file?

• ```your R code```

• ```{r} your R code```

• `r your R code`

• `your R code`

Question 5: What are options in Quarto?

Generate Document(s)

Quarto in VS Code

Key Takeaways

In this module, you were introduced to Quarto and learned:

• The key differences between Quarto and RMarkdown

• How to make a Quarto Markdown document

• The working modes

• How to format markdown syntax

• How to include code chunks and plots in your work

• How to render the document to different report formats

• How to use Quarto in RStudio and VS Code